The last game I played I had more planets, research and production the whole time but when I met the AI they clearly had multiple 1K + techs and I was still spending a long time to research 300 / 500 techs. Does the AI cheat?

Yeah, the Empires window only shows you what you can see, the graphs give you everything, as you can't see most of an empire until you've scouted it out it won't be accurate.

And no, the AI deliberately doesn't cheat, it's a design objective to avoid that sort of thing, the AI is, however,s cripted to make closer to optimal choices to get good outputs early from various techs and knows, for example, what order to research the early to mid stage growth techs, this can make a bigger difference than some realise.

Look at the actual graphs to see how things have gone, alternatively make sure that the high end techs haven't been unlocked by ancient ruins or similar.

Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

If you're referring to the game, I was going for titanic hull but I have to get those early research points into survival first so that I can go into the lategame without getting crushed early on by all those damn cerberuses.

Right now they're throwing large roid ships with 4 plasma cannons at me.

In order to get to those later ships you can't really sacrifice early on.

I rolled into a seed with large distances between them and only toxic or tundra/swamp planets to colonize, so that took some time to work up the skill trees to be able to inhabit them with humans.

What Im finding with the Ai is they tend to have practically every bonus available for the growth and PP and research by invading the planets like that.